Re: A Roadmap for TexInfo without Info

[Gavin Smith]

On 25 November 2016 at 07:27, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Per Bothner <address@hidden>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2016 15:34:38 -0800
>> Cc: Texinfo <address@hidden>
>>
>> > When writing a manual and using references, they are rendered differently 
>> > in each format (info/html/pdf).
>>
>> The emacs info mode does a better job with references, so they look more 
>> like they would in html.
>
> But it fails, sometimes spectacularly so, in some not-so-rare cases.
> It definitely causes the text to appear not correctly laid-out,
> because in the Info format the layout is done at generation time, not
> at display time.
>
> The truth is that the Info format cannot be "fixed" at display time,
> except in very marginal cases.

Yes, because text in the Info format can't be properly reflowed. The
main reason is that there's nothing to distinguish paragraphs (which
should be reflowed), with code samples (or poetry), which shouldn't.
There are possible heuristics involving line length and indentation
that could be used, but they wouldn't be 100% reliable.

Personally, it is not a big problem for me because I tend to use
terminal windows that are 80 columns wide anyway. I can live with the
shorter lines that occasionally occur with the removal of "*note ".

Another minor problem is end-of-sentence spacing. If a full stop
appears at the end of a line, it would be difficult to decide whether
it was the end of a sentence or not. To work around this, reflowed
text should probably only use a single space at the end of a sentence,
instead of two. HTML also doesn't make a distinction between two
spaces and one.